Ongoing Rebirth Of Mythos, Euro Beta Now

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Of all the ill-fated games of recent years that I have been surprised to see live again, Mythos comes close to top of the list. When Flagship spiraled into bankruptcy it looked like the game would go down with them, but it turns out that companies such as HanbitSoft, Red Bana, and Frogster had other ideas. Over the past year the game has slowly come back to life, and has been at closed beta in North America for a while now. Frogster have just send word that their European beta for the “hack ‘n slash MMO” (they’re calling the “first” hack ‘n’ slash MMO, which doesn’t quite ring true in my brain) is now taking sign ups. There’s also a lovely video of the game in action on their site, too. Glad to see this one survive, and I am looking forward to seeing live and playable.

Problem with WoW is that it isn’t actually hack & slash. It’s hit one of 30 buttons, wait a while, and watch a guy swing a sword. Hit one of 30 buttons, wait a while, and watch a guy swing a sword. Guild Wars was much faster paced than that, had just 8 buttons, and it required observation of the battlefield (body-blocking) but it still wasn’t hack & slash, per say. That would imply an action MMORPG. And we haven’t seen that idea fleshed out very well, have we? Good action MMOs exist, without doubt, but good action MMORPGs? Hm. The only really example was the Mythos prototype, yeah? And that was nowhere near a complete game.

Guild Wars 2 is headed down that track though, as is Fallout Online by the looks of it, and then there’s TERA (which I’d be more interested in if the developers weren’t so completely pervy). So there are games like that on the horizon. Will Mythos-Europe actually be good? Hard to say, I don’t know how it’s been mangled post-Runic. But the Runic beta of it was pretty good. Suffice it to say, I’m signed up to find out just how mangled (or not) it is.

I was in the beta for this under Flagship back in 2008 (for those of you who were in the beta, from just after Zone 2 was implemented up until the end). Still haven’t gotten a reply back for this iteration of the beta.

Once it goes open, I’ll approach with extreme skepticism. Mythos was one of my favorite games back in the first beta days.

I’m not holding my breath for this – HanbitSoft seems likely to go the way of Flagship. They’ve shut down a number of their studios (including their small US studio that they only had open for about a year) due to lack of funds in the last year. If Mythos finally comes out, it’ll likely not be around for too long, and North American players will have to play on servers in Asia.